I think I may have liked it a whole lot more if it was set in the past, preferably the twenties. There’s a number of reasons for this and I’m sure a lot of readers will disagree with me but here goes. The bulk of the story happens over the Christmas break, just a few days. A lot of stuff comes out into the open and I didn’t feel it was long enough for Gwen to connect with the family or adequate time for all those secrets to be revealed. In these modern times, Christmas is one of the few times family gather together to create a situation for this plot to unfold. If we hop in our time machine, it would have been more common for wealthier families to disappear “off to the country” for weeks or months at a time. Just think of Brideshead Revisited (which I couldn’t get out of my head whilst reading this, whilst the themes and style is different, it starts with a friend being taken to the family home in the country and the family member wanting to hide his family away).
2 Comments
Leave a Reply
![[gifted] Surprise #bookpost from @orbitbooks_uk - thanks @gambit589!
🐺🐺🐺
#bookstagram #instabook #booknerdigans #forthewolf #hannahwhitten](https://www.curiositykilledthebookworm.net/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
Black Sun
Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so. The opening line may seem like something any mother would tell her son, but in the case of Serapio, his mother truly believes he will become the Crow God reborn. She blinds him,…
Legendborn
The day Bree gets accepted into an early college placement at UNC, is the day her mother dies. The last words they spoke were of anger. Unable to deal with her dad’s grief on top of her own, Bree goes ahead with the placement. Once…
Ninth House
Alex Stern does not belong at Yale. When she awakes as the sole survivor of a multiple homicide, presumed a drug deal gone wrong, she is given an unlikely offer. Come to Yale, join the House of Lethe and oversee the rituals of the other…
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
Just let me dust off this blog thing, I have a review for you! One of my anticipated reads released during lockdown was the follow-up to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. If you read that, of course will will be dying to know what happened to…
For those of you not on RiSi, Linda posted a reponse @ http://forums.readitswapit.co.uk/forums/p/90042/858791.aspx#858791
"I just tried to post a comment on your blog, patchworkbunny, but it didn't like my ID and the comment was lost, so just popping in to say I was very intertested to read your thoughtful comments.
One of the points of the novel was that this dysfunctional family live in the past – and a fantasy past – a point that would have been difficult to make if the book was actually set in the past. The domineering matriarch who lives in a Blyton-esque fantasy world of her own would not have countenanced a TV in her sitting room. (I think if anyone had wanted to watch tv they'd have had to have a set in their bedroom!)
Board games and musical soirees were meant to seem anachronistic. The idea was that Gwen had wandered (like Alice) into a mad time-capsule world which was both attractive and unsettling.
Thanks anyway for sharing your thoughts on the book. I'm always very interested to hear what readers think. A great many editors turned this book down, so you're not alone in having reservations!"
Well I find it great to see different opinions on a book. I had said I felt it may have dragged or dulled but then it pulled me right in and I really liked it. I think the world would be a boring place if we all liked/hated the same things.